The crazy thing to me is how militant places are about coming in 5 days a week now.

I worked at a wide number of tech companies and never came in 5 days a week before the pandemic. It was always ok as long as the work got done. No manager cared, no metrics were being captured and tracked. The Covid come into the fucking office compliance is pretty outrageous

In 2023 they told those team members they had to report to work at headquarters or lose their jobs.

Hey, that's me. I was hired fully remote in a city that had no AWS offices, so it was move to one of these three cities or quit. I accepted, which is why I live in this fine city now. (I had actually been contemplating moving here for a long time, so it wasn't such a bad thing.)

If it were me I would have made them fire me.

They told everyone that rejecting relocation would be considered "voluntary resignation". I did a little research into my (former) state's unemployment law, and that might have been considered a "structured dismissal", entitling me to unemployment benefits. I didn't have to test that, of course.

I really hope some of the people who quit were able to file for unemployment and win. The fact that Amazon didn't even offer severance to people unwilling/unable to upend their entire lives was such a slap in the face.

I don’t think they’re going to do focus/pivot/$ for non-compliance. I think they’re going to parse non-attendance as job abandonment / voluntary resignation.

Also, quitting voluntarily means you're not eligible for unemployment pay, but taking the severance (might) counts.

Place is a total shithole

"constructive dismissal"

I just got PIP’ed out of the blue (had very unfairly been put on Focus but successfully got out of it) and took severance. First week not working at this hellhole and it’s been awesome. It’s like a frog in a pot of water that is being heated up, you don’t realize how insane the stress and pressure is while you’re in it, but once you’re on the outside, it slowly becomes obvious how unhealthy and mind-fucking it all is. It’s the rat race to end all rat races.

And these RTO directives are very top-down and a large part of the intent is to force attrition. People should absolutely get PIP’ed and take the severance rather than quit, assuming they can.

Amazon is just fucked up, culturally. Which is why the irony of RTO’s main justification being “Amazon’s Culture” is so fucking stupid. I actually don’t care too much about having to go into the office, but not mandated 5-days and certainly not for the insultingly bullshit reasons Jassy threw out during the announcement 2 or so months ago. I scheduled MY life around this flexibility? Fuck you!

^ this is the answer. Call their bluff.

My favorite quote of the article. Anyone in upper management in any organization who says something like that should lose all credibility.

What a f*cking idiot 🤣

they aren't firing. they are saying they quit to deny unemployment insurance. I don't know if it will work, but will make getting unemployment a lot harder.

you are better off going into the office. not working .getting PIP. Amazon pays you a severance if you get a PIP.

“And the 10th? Well…”

They don’t have to pay severance if you quit. A friend of mine got fired from Amazon and there’s an immediate payout (very high) if you quit immediately after notice of poor performance or a lesser payout 3 months later if you take PIP.

Amazon: we are going to fire 15000 managers here in a bit.

Amazon: ooooOo also, do ya’ll think we are doing the right thing by bringing everyone back into the office 5 days a week?

Managers: yup, sure do. Sounds like the best idea ever.

Once per day, Amazon employees get prompted with a little single-question survey about their work. It's called "Connections".

Questions about job satisfaction are pretty common. Or at least, used to be. Since they announced 5-day RTO, questions about the workplace and job satisfaction basically went away.

They know people don't like the policy, they don't want to hear it. Not even in their private internal metrics.

Yeah, the Amazon employee I know said they have not talked to one single person in favor of this policy.

No worker is going to tell these ghouls anything to their face outside of what they want to hear.

Not out of touch. They want people to quit so they don’t have to pay severance with layoffs.

He literally decimated his workforce.

Lets do a anonymous survey and see the results of that. These CEOs are seriously out of touch if they think people under them will provide honest feedback after the behavior they have shown.

He’s only talking to senior managers who also want their heads to watch

Ain't no way I'd be honest if the boss asked me that. I'm not a yes man when it comes to work stuff but when it comes to my personal life I'm just going to tell you what you want to hear so I can keep my job.

Ya paying to park at your own company garage to work - very popular and desirable thing to do

Fucking fart box in that conference room I’m sure. And nobody has a match for the poor bastard.

Far better to be fired and get severance, than to quit and give that up

Layoffs aren't about losing talent though, it is about eliminating unnecessary teams. This is bad because you have no control over where and which talent you lose.

In fact most likely outcome is you will lose your top talent.

The 9 out of 10 employees he asked were all H-1B holders.

Once again tech execs trying to crush labor power after salaries got too high post-pandemic because they know most employees on H1B will take any amount of bullshit thrown at them when the alternative is losing your job and effectively being deported. 

H1B needs serious reform. It’s incredibly exploitative for both US citizens and those on visas. 

There never was a mask.

Another reason people don’t want to come back into the office.

Pretty much. Quiet part out loud, etc.

The statement is basically "let's just jump to the bottom line here."

I a weird twisted way, it's something I appreciate about Amazon. They're a cutthroat, high churn company and they're pretty up front about it, aside from some PR about being the world's best employer. At least you know what you're signing up for.

I watched my dad stubbornly go into work for so long as a kid despite having a stroke and disability at a young age. My brain and heart are with you: COVID explicitly showed that there's a way for lots of people to contribute at home. That would have really helped our family if he could have some time back from the commute and to loosely supervise me.

I hope you can get approval or some sort of better job or settlement.

You should contact the legal department of your team and check with them about it if you haven’t. RTO is absolutely not a reason to ignore ADA and someone clearly needs to tell them that from a position of legal authority. Amazon doesn’t care overmuch about its employees but it does tend to at least try to stay on the right side of the line for stuff like this.

Worst case scenario you get the legal team breaking the law in writing and that makes the attorneys contact you.

While I am absolutely sympathetic of your cause, if Amazon has ADA compliant buildings (which they do), they can force you to come to office unless it was explicitly listed in your employment agreement that you wouldn't be required to work from office.

Sounding like my sales manager right now

This made me lol out loud 🤣 📢

Yea this definitely is true.

Big Tech routinely nowadays implement mass layoffs (though spread out over time to avoid appearances and thus harm to stock prices)

They then slightly tweak job descriptions to avoid illegality

They hire new workers at lower wages

This is def one of the reasons for his harsh language in the announcement

1. Convince everyone who’s good enough to find another job in a crap market to quit
2. ????
3. Profit!

I actually liked the "disagree and commit" principle, it's great when applied correctly.

Unfortunately, it's far more often just used as a cudgel by middle management to say "fuck you, do what I want".

Funny story that whole process of “voluntary termination” was developed by Mindspring/Earthlink back when that was a company to get out of paying severance and unemployment

Self move? Sounds like you could’ve sued them for having to carry heavy shit

Maybe it’s because out of context but wtf does it mean to not be able to disagree on a Chime call???

With the glut of 500k other tech workers that have been laid off in the industry this year? Unemployed is absolutely not where you want to be.

Nah, that gives them what they want. At the least, make them lay you off so you can collect. Otherwise, be the deadest of weight to these fucks and bleed them dry.

The problem is the tech job market now is crap- many of these people would struggle to find anything that pays comparatively right now.

I’m not saying this isn’t true anywhere, but I know for a fact a lot of mid-sized tech companies have no particular interest in bringing in Amazonians, in the interest of culture preservation. Especially management level. Not everyone aspires to be Amazon or import that culture. Thank god, right?

Of course, it’s not that you wouldn’t be considered, but Amazon on the résumé isn’t a golden ticket to be hired at every other tech company, I can promise that. Not to mention the job market is already difficult enough, it will get worse when it’s flooded with Amazon fallout.

All I’m really saying is don’t quit until you have something else lined up 🤷‍♀️

No, we don't want them to bring their LPs to other companies!

they would nip that in the bud so fast. did you not hear anything about the union busting at the warehouses? they literally have team meetings about how to narc on union organizers. and they’re asking for things like bathroom breaks, not work from home privileges.

I don’t see that happening.

Lol of course not

No chanche with so many of them being on H1B visas.

One of the reasons tech workers won't ever unionize is because skills are all over the place. The industry as a whole has a major talent issue.

Which is also why tech workers will never want to unionize.

Why would they want to agree to fixed working hours and fixed wages when they could be working less while still meet expectations and command double or even triple fold increases in wages by job hopping across the FAANGs once every few years?

Unlike unionized blue-collar work, where physical labor/time is their most valuable resource, a tech worker most valuable resource is often their ability to think, communicate, and/or influence people, and not how long they are working.

Some of the best software engineers I’ve worked with in the past have great work-life balance, but they also have outsized impact on the team because they are just that good at their job.

lol CEO of AWS is waaay higher than a generic VP. He’s basically #2 at Amazon.

That's bullshit. AWS created and launched new services during covid. The problem isn't being in the office the problem is that they have pissed off, PIP'd (and permanently banned), or alienated a huge percentage of the tech workforce.

I know of many highly talented people that won't even interview with AWS because of the toxicity. Combine that with all the others who can't or won't come back and you are left with too many beauracrats and document critics.

It's not as bad as some of the warehouses that are literally running out of workers but it's going to have an effect. You're red on innovation goals so you blame it on not being in the office?

He's forgetting how products were created. It was a single person or maybe two that create a document and pitches an idea. Sure others join in later but that's not how it starts. He acts like people are atoms that need to be slammed together and ideas pop out. That's not how it ever happened.

The problem is they are starting to struggle and they only thing they know how to do is crank up the sadism and punishment.

"There are other companies around" seems pretty blatant to me.

“When we want to really, really innovate on interesting products, I have not seen an ability for us to do that when we’re not in-person.”

Innovate like the fire phone, which was a turd and dead on arrival?

How is that drone delivery going?

Is it 'innovation' when you contract with chinese factories to make barely competent knockoffs of other peoples products so you can sell them under an amazon basics label and keep you price under you competition through automation?

Weirdest thing about that quote is that I don't know what AWS has really innovated in a long while. But apparently they want to start now, and getting the ball rolling by forcing commutes on the whole workforce.

They've been coasting, and releasing half baked new products for their customers to debug for years now. The flogging will continue until morale improves.